When my daughter Mia added “a cookbook” to her holiday wish list, I was pretty thrilled. My son Miles loves to help in the kitchen and has already mastered making and seasoning many of his favorite foods. At gift-giving occasions he is likely to receive much appreciated tins of smoked salt, bottles of aged soy sauce, and links of cured meats, but Mia has stayed largely out of the kitchen.

Mia’s relationship to food and cooking has been difficult in ways too complicated to share here. Her tastes exist at the exotic/sophisticated and bland/banal ends of the food spectrum, with not much palatable to her in between. Aside from the occasional pan of brownies or batch of cookies, her preferences lie with anything that passes first through her mother’s hands. Apparently, I am better at buttering toast, adding milk to coffee, or dressing a salad—all things she claims don’t taste quite right when she does them.

She will go away to college next year and will likely be living in a dorm where she cooks her own food, so there has been a lot of worry about who will butter her bread. Enter the cookbook. At first, I thought of getting her a copy of the only cookbook that lives permanently in our kitchen, Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything. That ought to cover it, right? But, I wondered. was she looking for how to cook or—how to eat?

I bought her instead Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, and it is perfection. It is a book about how to cook and includes incredibly helpful information and illustrations for the novice—the difference between dice, mince, chop, and slice, for example. But it is also a book about how to eat. What are the essential elements that make foods enjoyable to us? How do we bring those elements to the foods we prepare at home? Essentially, how do I butter my bread or dress my greens, so it suits my palate?

Samin Nosrat is an adept storyteller, but useful information takes center stage throughout. There are recipes too that I hope Mia will try and beautiful illustrations and helpful infographics by Wendy MacNaughton. I am ordering a second copy to live permanently in my own kitchen.

—SCB

ps: Samin Nosrat also has a great Eat column in the New York Times Magazine.